Community Voices

Dr. Dobb's Bloggers

Linux, QT, LGPL and the Desktop

January 27, 2009

About two weeks ago, I got a call from Christian Gross , SD West Advisory Board member and resident idea guy. Now anyone who knows me, knows that I work East Coast hours despite living on the West Coast, so I often get early morning calls from Christian, since he's in Zurich. He has a lot of crazy ideas, and that's what we love about him. His crazy ideas are often proven to be more prescient than crazy.

His latest lightbulb? Linux may finally have a shot at conquering the desktop--thanks to Nokia's purchase of Trolltech and the decision to make QT LGPL. In the past, QT was available under GPL and a commercial license. If you wanted to develop commercial apps, you had to fork over nearly 5K for the multiplatform license.

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task.
However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Video

This month's Dr. Dobb's Journal

This month,
Dr. Dobb's Journal is devoted to mobile programming. We introduce you to Apple's new Swift programming language, discuss the perils of being the third-most-popular mobile platform, revisit SQLite on Android
, and much more!